Monthly Archives: February 2013

One of the major consequences of the forthcoming end of Saturday mail delivery will be a spike in late fees, interest charged, overdraft fees, and so on as consumers’ bills arrive on Monday (or Tuesday, all too often, after a three-day weekend) instead of Saturday… and the same for their payments, which is even worse, because they won’t get into the outgoing mail until Tuesday (or Wednesday), frequently reaching their endpoints on Saturday (or the following week, especially for all of those credit-card payments going to South Dakota). This is going to be a particular problem with mortgage payments by senior citizens, many of whom do not and/or cannot use electronic transfers. This represents a windfall for the finance industry. It’s a preventable windfall. I therefore modestly propose the following:

No late fee, overdraft fee, interest, finance charge, or any other fee based on timeliness of payment may be asserted or charged on any consumer obligation on or for any day on which there is no United States Postal Service delivery of first-class mail, excepting only twelve (12) designated federal holidays each year.

I suspect that the finance industry would fall all over itself to rescue Saturday (and even Sunday) delivery of the mail under such circumstances. It would cost somewhere around one cent per month per customer account across the industry to fully fund the USPS — and the finance industry would get all of that back, and more, in interest (etc.).

Jotwell, the online journal of reviews of recent faculty scholarship relating to the law, needs a Student Summer Editor. The student editor supports faculty editors both at UM and elsewhere, and has a role that is a blend of a substantive editor and a managing editor.

The ideal candidate will be a current University of Miami School of Law 1L or 2L who is organized, a careful editor, and enjoys reading legal scholarship. Grades matter for this job, but a demonstrated ability to write and edit may substitute for grades up to a point. The job would start as soon as you are available after your Spring ’13 final exams and run to mid-August; there would be no problem if you wanted to take one or more vacation periods during that time, as long as none of them was for a long continuous period.

The workload typically runs 30 hours per week, and is paid at the law school’s research assistant scale, which in most cases is $13/hr. Jotwell uses WordPress to publish, but it is easy to learn, so no experience needed.

If you are interested, please email your c.v. (aka “your résumé”) and a copy (unofficial is fine) of your transcript to michael.froomkin@gmail.com. If you have a non-legal writing sample please include that also.

Some preference may be given to applicants who indicate that they also would be willing to continue as a part of the team of Student Editors during the 2013-2014 school year, a job that typically takes 7-10 hours per week.

There have been astonishing volumes of nonsense written about the Italian election. If you believed the MSM, ranging from NPR on over, you would believe the world was about to end, the barbarians were at the gates. It seems the Italian electorate has acted so terribly irresponsibly, by failing to vote for the austerity regime demanded by banks and currently tearing apart Greece. And the people they voted for – quelle horreur — they have no political experience. They could do anything!

Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a blistering statement today concurring in the denial of cert in Calhoun v. US. While agreeing with the Supreme Court’s decision on procedural grounds, Sotomayor — with (only) Breyer joining in — tore into the prosecutor in the underlying case for making an “argument[] calculated to appeal to the prejudices of the jury” and tapping “a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our Nation.”

The statement is powerful stuff. Justice Sotomayor mercifully does not name the prosecutor in her statement, thus saving him or her a lifetime of Internet-search-aided indignity.

This book is written for anyone interested in the innocence cause. The problem of wrongful convictions is moving more and more into the public’s eye every day. This book is specifically written to guide a student or participant through an innocence program step by step. It covers everything from how not to get too worried about the clients to how to conduct a client interview. It really is everything you need to know to participate in an innocence program. It is also a valuable resource for those directing innocence programs or hoping to start one. It provides templates for forms and suggestions for best practices for procedures necessary to run an exemplary innocence program. It is a must for any student enrolled in a law school innocence program. It will help the students hit the ground running and allow programs to get help to the clients more efficiently. No other book on the market is available that encompasses all of the major issues for effective innocence work in one convenient place.